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“What is your favourite sound?” was one of the questions that the legendary French interviewer and literary figure, Bernard Pivo, used to ask his interviewees. The answers were usually interesting but not very original. “The sounds of nature,” “A champagne cork popping,” “The harmonious cacophany of the orchestra tuning up before a concert,” were some of the answers that I can remember.

Had he interviewed me I would have given a different reply, though I’ll grant that those are all very agreeable sounds. The sound that I like best is the buzz and hum made by the voices of my children and grandchildren as they sit at the dining-table while I am giving out the food that comprises our Friday night meal.

Whoever designed our house must have had a typical family meal in mind when he (or she) placed our rather small but compact kitchen adjacent to the dining corner, so that eye and ear contact between the two is not lost. The layout is arranged in such a way that there is not very far to go from the hob, where the saucepans are arrayed, to the diners sitting at the table. We have been living in the house for almost thirty years, so that inititally we just needed room for ourselves plus one or two of our offspring. Then along came their spouses, followed by children of their own, so that where once we had to find room for five or six people, today our table is often laid for twelve, fourteen or more. There was a time when there were several little ones either sitting at the table or running around and playing football or tag in our open-plan living area. Thankfully, those days are now long gone.

Over the years the grandchildren have grown up, so that by now most of them are adults, and this brings me to the sound I love. As they sit together at the dining table they talk about the various subjects that interest them (not politics) and because by now we have four or five grandsons who are at one stage or another of their military service or have even completed it, their voices are deep and manly. And it is the sound of their animated conversation, often interspersed by guffaws of laughter, that I find so pleasant to my ears. Of course, the feminine voices of the women of the family, and especially the granddaughters, are also to be heard, and the combined constant background of conversation is as music to my ears.

Of course, the mobile phones are unavoidable and ubiquitous, and are sometimes whipped out to check a fact or to support a point. Our Friday night meals are a mixture of tradition and modernity, beginning with the traditional blessing over bread and wine (Kiddush), but that’s as far as tradition is allowed to intrude into our gathering. One memorable evening, when the man of the house was away, one of the grandsons volunteered to pronounce the blessing. This raised my feminist hackles, and I said that anyone can pronounce the blessing, even me, whereupon the assembled grandchildren rounded on me and insisted that I do so. I had no choice but to comply, and the memory of this continues to amuse my family to this day.

To conclude the meal, either together with dessert or with the tea and cake that follows, we turn to the weekly general knowledge quiz that is a regular feature of the weekend edition of the newspaper, and a combined effort is invested in trying to solve the questions. One person reads out the questions, which cover a wide range of subjects, some of which can be known only by members of the younger generation (TV programs, sport, pop music, etc.), while others are more esoteric, ranging from English and world literature to scientific subjects. We do our best to cover all areas of expertise between us, but rarely manage to come up with more than fifty percent of the answers.

I don’t know how much longer our children and grandchildren will be able to continue assembling at our house most Friday nights, or how long I will be able to cook a meal for a large number of people. All I can say is that as long as I have the strength, I’ll keep on doing so. Whatever the physical toll may be, it is more than compensated for by the emotional satisfaction our family dinners give me.

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When Ron Regev strides onto the stage to talk about the Beethoven piano sonatas he is about to play, the audience is immediately captivated by his youthful bearing, informal way of talking and encyclopaedic knowledge of his subject. Setting the topic in its musical, historical and philosophical context, he provides us with additional understanding and appreciation of the music we are about to hear.

Attending another of the series of recitals accompanied by explanations that Dr. Regev has been giving over the past few weeks at the Ein Karem Music Center, with its intimate atmosphere and rural setting, we are once again entranced and fascinated by Dr. Regev’s charm and talent. In fact, he is something of a phenomenon, having been appointed head of the Jerusalem Music Academy’s keyboard department at a very early age while continuing to pursue a successful career as a performing musician.

To see and hear Dr. Regev in the course of this series, at each of which he discusses and plays several Beethoven piano sonatas (no mean feat in and of itself) is to take a journey into the complex world of Beethoven the man and the composer, as well as to learn about his place in the musical world. Regev’s abilities and broad understanding of his field enables him to establish Beethoven’s connections with those musicians and composers who went before him as well as with those who followed him.

Seemingly without any particular effort, after giving a few introductory remarks, Regev strides over to the piano and plays a few passages from a piece by Schubert, then plays the corresponding piece in Beethoven’s Sonata no. 18 to demonstrate the similarities between them, concluding with a few bars from Saint-Saen’s piano concerto for additional emphasis. Needless to say, all the works he plays are infinitely complex, requiring the dexterity, concentration and musicality of a concert pianist, and this he achieves with what appears to be great ease.

Regev was one of the first musicians to use an ipad instead of musical notation on paper as an aide to playing. In this, however, he is no longer unique as it is becoming more and more customary to see musicians using the digital device. From where I was sitting I was fascinated to be able to observe the way the music appears on the screen and automatically progresses without any ‘human’ intervention such as having to take one’s hands off the piano keys to turn the page (or have an assistant at hand to do the work). Amongst other things, Regev serves as musical advisor to the Tonara company that has developed the program that ‘hears’ the music being played and automatically progresses to the next passage. On the screen the page is turned automatically, making life much easier for the performing artist.

Still, though scientific progress may be all well and good, it can never compensate for depth of feeling and the ability to convey emotion through the notes that are played, and this Dr. Regev manages to achieve with admirable aplomb.

And so, once again, an evening that combined an uplifting musical experience with enlightenment that was neither condescending nor trivialising came to a satisfying end with an impassioned performance of Beethoven’s sonata no. 23, popularly known as the Appassionata Sonata, whose ending with a bravura cascade of chords simply took our breath away.

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Watching the daily newscasts it’s impossible to escape seeing and hearing the horrific events that are taking place not too far away from where I’m sitting now. The impact of telecommunications is unescapable. From here in Jerusalem to Damascus, just to the north of Israel, it’s only 135 miles.

The so-called ‘civil war’ has been going on in Syria for some seven years now and nobody seems able to predict how and when it will end. Some pundits claim it started when climate changes caused crop failures, which led to food shortages, setting off a series of – initially peaceful – protests, but which turned violent when government forces opened fire on the protesters. Who exactly is fighting whom is complex in the extreme, with a large number of different elements involved, among them fundamentalist groups such as ISIS and its offshoots, some of them fighting against one another.

What is clear is that President Bashar al-Assad is determined to hang on to power at all costs and is not prepared to give way to any of the various forces seeking to unseat him. To this end it appears that he has enrolled the support of Russia and Iran, both of which have sent forces to support him in his battle to overcome his enemies. What is obvious is that neither of those two countries is doing so for altruistic motives, and each has an agenda of its own to promote, whether it’s to secure a foothold in the Middle East, as is the case with Russia, or to extend its influence in the region, as is the case with Iran.

What each of those countries sees as the ultimate aim is the issue with which the rest of the world – and Israel in particular – should be seeking to grapple, and it is that which presumably ought to concern world leaders. Unfortunately, many of those leaders are far too preoccupied with domestic matters, and above all with staying in power, to devote too much time and attention to dealing with the skirmishes in what to them is a remote spot. Millions of Syrians have been made homeless and are now forced to live in refugee camps in neighbouring countries or have embarked on the long and dangerous journey to Europe.

But for Israel, Syria is our next-door neighbor, and what we see going on just over the border is both horrifying and terrifying. It is horrifying because any person with an iota of humanitarian feeling cannot fail to quail and wail at the scenes of bloodshed and misery caused by the relentless bombing of civilian neighbourhoods, and worst of all the chemical attacks that have left innocent bystanders dead, injured or gasping for breath. Scenes of prostate bodies, of crying children unable to stand, of families torn asunder by the death and destruction rained upon them from the sky have become our daily fare, and it seems heartless to sit and watch all this happening from the comfort of our homes.

But worse still, it is terrifying to us in Israel because it makes us wonder, if this is how Assad treats his own people, what would he do to us, given half a chance? One thing is obvious: we cannot rely on his or anyone else’s sense of humanity when it comes to sending missiles in our direction. Still today, after the State of Israel has been in existence for almost seventy years, the only way of defending ourselves seems to be to make sure that Assad, and anyone else so inclined, knows that they will pay a heavy price if they attack us. It’s not a very comfortable or comforting feeling, but we must hope that it is clear to all concerned that only our own strength and resilience continues to keep our enemies at bay.

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“Who among you knows the names of your great-grandparents?” the speaker asked. Only a few of us put our hands up. “Who of you has a family tree?” he continued. Even fewer of our group of English-speakers living in Israel responded positively. Our speaker, Neville Lamdan, proceeded to explain how in 1967, as a young diplomat serving in Israel’s foreign service in America, he had been inspired – as had many others – by Alex Haley’s book ‘Roots,’ to start investigating the origins of his family. The lecturer then described the process of searching for material, noting how the collapse of the USSR enabled formerly inaccessible archives to be opened up for research purposes. And obviously, the later development of the internet helped in many ways.

I wondered why anyone would need Alex Haley or anyone else to spur interest in their family’s origins. It was a subject that always fascinated me. My parents came to England as refugees from Germany late in 1938. They were not allowed to bring any valuables or other possessions with them, but what they both brought out, quite independently (they were engaged but not married at the time), were family documents and correspondence detailing their respective families’ histories.

Although I ached to understand the contents of those papers they were inaccessible to me for a long time until I started to learn German some thirty years ago (my parents did not speak German at home, as in war-time England this was not considered advisable, and luckily both of them spoke English well).

Among those papers brought out of Germany were the lists typed on yellowing paper that were compiled in January 1939 by my grandfather, my mother’s father, Max Hirsch, in Sprottau (then in Silesia, Germany, now Szpratawa, Poland) detailing the history of his family. The neatly typed pages contain an introduction about the whereabouts and livelihoods of the Hirsch family, first in Gollub, Poland, and subsequently in Prussia, where certain privileged Jewish families were allowed to reside in the mid-eighteenth century.

The first page is dedicated to ‘our forebears’ (his great-grand-parents), Elias Hirsch-Dubrski, born on 16.3.1783 and his wife, Miriam Jakob-Kuski, born 14.11.1786, from Mattebuden, Danzig. The couple had seven sons and one daughter, and each of the following pages is devoted to one of those eight children, with neat columns listing their spouses and offspring. Dates and other details are given and cross-referenced in a numbered index at the end.

The amount of dedicated work that must have gone into preparing and typing up all this information is immense, and I can only stand back in awe at the dedication and effort that the grandfather I never met invested in the project at a time when it was becoming clear that the end of the Jewish communities throughout Germany, and Europe in general, was coming ever nearer.

On my father’s side, which originated in Holland, we owe a debt of gratitude to a distant relative, Sal van Son, who has been studying the family’s history for many years, and has even produced several books on the subject (in Dutch). One of them, ‘The van Son Family, the History of a Jewish Family from the Gelderland and Overijssel Provinces; Two Centuries of Dutch-Jewish Life in Sorrow and Joy,’ recounts the history of the van Sons in various parts of Holland, starting in 1757. My father’s branch of the family moved to Hamburg in 1823, and became well-established there. My father, Manfred van Son, had the book translated into Hebrew and English, and he and various other family members added segments describing their own branches. A bilingual English-Hebrew edition of the book was published, so that we now have a well-fleshed-out account of our family’s history. Credit is also due to Jürgen Sielemann, former head of the Hamburg State Archive, who established the German-Jewish Geneaological Society, and continues to be active in it. He has been the source of much valuable documentary material about our family over the years.

My own small contribution has been to prepare a graphic version of the two family trees, drawn by hand in the pre-digital era (1980) on paper used for architects’ plans measuring 22 inches by 27 inches, and containing over one hundred names, dating back to 1785. The chart was a handy reference when our American cousins visited us recently. Unfortunately,I have not been able to continue the work, and so by now the chart is hopelessly out of date. I hope that each branch of my extended family (my two sisters each have seven or eight children, who in turn have many children of their own), will continue the work somehow, some day.

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To mark Family Day, which is the Israeli version of Valentine’s Day (don’t ask me why), my husband and I were invited to visit the kindergarten which our granddaughter attends.

The kindergarten is rather special. It is situated in the Jerusalem neighbourhood of Abu Tor, which was once divided into Arab and Jewish parts by the border with Jordan. After the Six-Day War the two neighbourhoods were no longer separated and people could move freely between them, as was the case when I lived there some thirty years ago.

The building that contains the kindergarten is set in what was once a park on the edge of the two neighbourhoods. With the help of the Jerusalem Foundation and various donors, the building was erected by the Micha Organisation which extends aid and education to deaf and hearing-impaired children in Israel. On the ground floor of the building is a kindergarten for those children, as well as offices housing speech therapists and other professionals whose task it is to help these children.

But on the second floor is the Harmony Kindergarten, where Arab and Jewish children learn and play together, and where the ethnic composition is made up of equal numbers from each population. Three times a week the two kindergartens get together for joint activities, so that what happens in that environment is a three-fold mingling of children from two different cultures as well as those who can hear and those whose hearing is impaired. The activities of the Harmony Kindergarten are conducted in two languages, Arabic and Hebrew, with attendants who come from both segments of the population.

The activities on the Family Day which I attended started with an introduction and welcome proffered by the two main teachers, Dafna, who spoke in Hebrew, and Randa, who spoke in Arabic. The idea of the bilingual kindergarten had been incubating for a long time, and it was emphasized that its existence represents the fulfillment of a vision for all those involved. Then we were watched as our grandchildren all sang songs in both Arabic and Hebrew as they banged time on little plastic spoons. A light breakfast was served and together with our grandchildren we all partook of the delicacies that had been prepared.

For the rest of the morning we were divided into small groups and were directed to several stations where, together with our grandchildren, we painted, made sock-puppets and baked biscuits (wearing special hats). As was only to be expected, the Israeli and Arab grandparents all displayed equal pride in the achievements of their offspring, and it was heartening to sit side-by-side with our fellow-grandparents and work together to help and encourage the little ones. Although we were not always able to communicate verbally with one another, our smiles and gestures spoke volumes. Two of the stations were situated in the spacious and airy library, where children are able to sit and enjoy looking at books from the well-stocked shelves.

Children’s songs in both languages were played in the background as we worked at our various tasks and the atmosphere of genial cooperation was palpable. A great deal of thought and preparation had evidently been invested by the staff, and I think they were pleased with the result of their efforts. They certainly deserve a lot of credit for what they have achieved. As we left, after a period of free play in the open-air where a variety of toys and games were available, we were handed a little bag of toys for each child which we were were told was ‘a gift from Moussa’s grandmother.’

Children do not hate. That is something that they are taught by their elders and ‘betters’ somewhere along the way. If only the atmosphere of mutual cooperation that a small group of people experienced last week could prevail more widely, the world – and Israel – would be a better place. But it’s encouraging to find that there are some young parents out there who are doing their bit to overcome prejudice and encourage coexistence and cooperation between Jews and Arabs in Israel.

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As well as forging and facilitating connections between individuals, Facebook also provides the opportunity to form groups, bringing together people all over the world who share mutual interests. These are many and varied, and seem to have succeeded in their objective. Thus, some time ago a bright spark somewhere out there in the ether had the idea of creating a Facebook group entitled ‘Brits Living in Israel’ for discussing topics of interest to former residents of Great Britain now domiciled in Israel. I’m not sure how long this group has been in existence, but at present it numbers 4,853 members, and may still be growing, for all I know.

During its existence the FB group has provided a forum for English people in Israel to discuss all kinds of subjects, though the moderators have requested that we refrain from controversial political issues (in Israel) or try to further our own business interests and sales. In my own particular case I found salvation in my relentless quest for McVitie Digestive biscuits (dark chocolate preferably), when one of the members (thanks, Anton Delin) provided the address of a shop in Tel Aviv where they could be bought. Although getting to downtown Tel Aviv is only marginally less arduous for me than getting to London, imagine the surge of joy that filled my heart when I walked into the shop and saw the shelves stacked with the biscuits that I have loved since childhood. Over the fifty-odd years I have been living in Israel I have managed to bring packets back from my occasional visits to London, eking out their lifespan by rationing myself to one a day. In an amazing recent development (apparently due to a change in their composition and subsequent granting of a rabbinic Hechsher) they are now available in plentiful supply in most supermarkets in Israel. My joy knows no bounds, but I am doing my best to restrict my daily intake.

Other subjects discussed (and mainly complained about) by the members of the group have been the availability in Israel of Heinz vegetarian baked beans, the policies regarding the BBC of Israel’s TV channels, the price and availability of other much-loved foods and sweets, the difficulty of finding reliable handymen and the agony of dealing with Israeli bureaucracy. Fair enough. I’ve seen similar grievances raised in groups catering for British expats in France, so it all seems fairly standard.

But at some point last year one of the bright sparks (Anton Delin again, I believe) had another brilliant idea. Why not arrange an actual physical meeting for members of the group? This was duly done, in a pub appropriately called Murphy’s somewhere in the Tel Aviv area. I did not go to that but by all accounts it was a great success, and the idea of organising a similar event in the Jerusalem area was duly adopted. The meeting that ensued was held recently in a Jerusalem café, with some twenty-five members including myself in attendance. The choice of venue was excellent, and we were provided with a secluded room at the back of the café, so that we were accorded sufficient privacy and a relatively quiet environment.

Names that had formerly featured solely as disembodied entities moaning about the difficulty of obtaining baked beans, BBC programmes on TV, or Cadbury’s chocolate eggs now emerged as actual, visible people, of various shapes and sizes, different religious and political beliefs, and a preponderance of women over men. Over plates of fish and chips (not quite up to the British standard), pasta or sandwiches, according to the individual’s preference and purse, we all got to know one another a little better, finding connections to places where we had lived in England, relatives and communities we had known, places where we had once worked, and altogether finding ties to bind us closer together.

Which only goes to show that you can take the individual out of England, but you can’t take England out of the individual.

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It was not one of my best days. Deciding to do some washing, at the last minute I added my corduroy trousers (pants, if you’re American) into the washing machine, and it was only two hours later, after a persistent thump-thump noise finally impinged on my consciousness, that I realized that I’d left my super-duper iPhone in the pocket of those trousers.

After my initial panic I raced to the machine, opened it and extracted the unfortunate device, now sodden and somewhat battered.

Then began a series of rescue attempts. I had heard of miracle cures, such as putting the phone in the oven on a very low setting overnight, putting it in rice to extract the water, and we tried all those. It was a sunny day, so we lay the phone on the carpet in the hope that the sun would do its work and dry the poor waterlogged thing out.

But it was all to no avail. The phone seemed to be past all the help that we could provide. This called therefore for professional intervention.

We checked the local directory and asked friends and acquaintances for recommendations, and were sent to a local laboratory that apparently has a good reputation.

Tzach, the technician behind the desk, opened the phone and showed us that it was still waterlogged, but said he would do his best to restore it to its fully functioning former self. Luckily, my previous phone, a somewhat inferior version, was still in existence. So I retrieved it from the drawer in which it had been languishing since being superseded by its successor, the precious SIM card was transferred from the new phone to the old one, and I was sent away with hope in my heart that my suffering at having to endure this humiliating demotion would not persist for very long.

But many of the features to which I had become accustomed in the newer phone were unavailable in the old one, whether because of my own technical ineptitude or the phone’s inherent weakness. After having become accustomed to checking how far I had walked, how many steps I had taken or how many flight of stairs I had climbed, it was something of a blow not to have that feature constantly at my fingertips. Furthermore, being deprived of such features as constant weather updates, and, more importantly, Whatsapp, wherein reside the groups to which I belong, such as my close family, and the various language groups I attend, as well as being the site where photos of my latest grandchild are posted for my delectation as well as that of others, caused me real suffering. I was cut off from the virtual world to which I felt I belonged.

Phone calls to Tzach during the following week were met with the response that he was still working on the renewal project or was waiting for an essential part, and that I should be patient.

But eventually even he, a universally acknowledged magician in the field of mobile phone repair, was obliged to admit defeat. The only known remedy in such cases is to buy a new phone, which can be an expensive business. This was eventually resolved by taking advantage of the reduced offer made by one of the purveyors of these devices, and this procedure was followed by returning to Tzach and the lab in order to have all the features without which life is not worth living installed in the new device.

Once again, the SIM card was transferred from old to new, the device was told to start itself up, passwords were reinstalled, and eventually I was the proud possessor of a newer, faster, lighter but slightly smaller phone.

Once again I am a happy bunny. And I will have to try to be a more careful one in the future.

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The lecture given by David Young at Jerusalem’s AACI (Association of Americans and Canadians in Israel) was entitled ‘Over One Thousand Years of Scandals in the British Royal Family,’ and it attracted a record audience.

David Young, who lives in Israel but is originally from England, has written several historical novels. He had prepared his subject-matter well, posting a time-line of all England’s kings and queens since 1066 up on the lectern and referring frequently to his several pages of notes. After all, who can remember all those dates and sort out all the ramifications of the various affairs and scandals that have beset England’s royal family, or rather families, since the blood-line has been severed several times, over the centuries?

The audience, which consisted of mainly elderly English-speaking persons, some of whom even managed to stay awake during the lecture, as evinced by the chortles which emanated from their mouths whenever Mr. Young imparted another tidbit of salacious information. There’s nothing like a juicy sex scandal to wake up the over-eighties.

Mr. Young had certainly done his homework, and it would seem that scarcely a single British monarch has been entirely blameless when it comes to extra-marital exploits. I suppose that on consideration this is only understandable, since throughout history monarchs were obliged to marry members of other royal families in order to consolidate royal power and political influence, and these need not necessarily have been based on love, or even attraction.

So it was more or less taken for granted that monarchs would have one or more mistresses, and Mr. Young had many amusing anecdotes to recount on this score. Thus, King Charles the Second was known to have two mistresses, one of whom was Catholic. When Nell Gwynn, the other mistress, was confronted by a hostile crowd, she put her head out of the carriage and declared, ‘Kindly desist, gentlemen. I am the Protestant whore.’

In addition to his six wives, Henry the Eighth had several mistresses, one of which was the sister of Anne Boleyn. Mr. Young has written a novel about one of them, Anne of Cleves, whom he describes as Henry’s luckiest wife. This is undoubtedly true, as Henry found her to be fat and ugly, and divorced her shortly after their marriage. However, she was dismissed with a considerable fortune and was able to establish herself as a society hostess, eventually becoming a good friend to the king, known as ‘the king’s sister.’

Queen Victoria’s love for her husband, Prince Albert, was exemplary, and her long and enduring mourning for him is universally recognized as unparalleled in its devotion. However, her close relationship with her Scottish ghillie, John Brown, was considered to have passed the bounds of propriety, to the extent that the satirical journal, Punch, referred to the queen as ‘Mrs. Brown.’ In addition, she was also known to have had a very close relationship with an Indian servant. When she died, she was buried alongside Prince Albert, with a photograph of John Brown in her hand.

In more modern times the Prince of Wales, who was the eldest son of King George the Fifth, was obliged to abdicate from his position as King Edward the Eighth because on becoming king he would have been unable to marry his mistress, Wallis Simpson, an American divorcee. This meant that his younger brother became King George the Sixth, and he in turn was succeeded by his daughter, the current Queen Elizabeth the Second.

It’s interesting to note that the Queen’s grandson, Prince Harry, is currently engaged to an American divorcee, Meghan Markel, and there is no mention of his being unable to remain a prominent member of the royal family.

So it would seem that there have been some changes in the ancient traditions of the British royal family, in keeping with the shift in morals, mores and attitudes in modern British society.

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Despite the cold and the rain of the January night, Jerusalem’s principal concert hall, Binyanei HaUma was packed to almost full capacity (over 3,000 seats) for the performance by the world-renowned Israel Philharmonic Orchestra of Gustav Mahler’s seventh symphony, conducted by Dmitri Jurowski.

The programme notes informed us that Mahler was suffering from what could be called ‘composer’s block’ in the summer of 1905, when he retreated to the country to compose, as was his wont, after the rigors of the working year serving as conductor of the Vienna Opera. It was only when boating on a nearby lake that the plash of the oars suddenly gave him the inspiration to compose.

To be quite honest, at last night’s performance I failed to pick up any plash of oars or any watery allusion whatsoever. Mahler’s seventh symphony is generally acknowledged to be more difficult to understand and interpret than his previous ones, and last night’s performance bore this conclusion out, despite some stellar playing by the orchestra’s virtuoso members, almost one hundred of whom sat crowded on the stage.

What most distinguishes this symphony, in my opinion, is the absence of any identifiable, continuous melodic thread. Three of its five movements bears a descriptive heading, such as ‘Night Music’ and Shadlow-like,’ alongside the more mundane Adagio-Allegro of the first movement and Rondo-Finale of the last, but these titles do not really explain what is going on in the music.

From the introductory passage played by the horn to the grand finale, where all the instruments are playing fortissimo, with percussion galore and two (yes, two!) sets of tubular bells all giving of their utmost, the symphony is replete with all the familiar elements that we have come to know and love in Mahler’s other symphonies. And so we hear the familiar rise and fall of the strings, the echoing notes of the woodwinds and brass, the interplay between the various brass instruments, the melodious notes of the two harps, and the inimical sounds of the different kinds of drums. In his childhood Mahler lived close to a military barracks, and the sounds he heard then resound through his music and thus come to our ears, too.

But it’s the absence of any continuous melodic thread that I find most disturbing in this symphony, which nonetheless bears all the hallmarks of Mahler’s music. Snippets of other, more accessible symphonies of his appear and recur throughout the performance, and at times one thinks that one is able to recognize where a theme is going, but then it disappears and a different one emerges. The symphony as a whole seemed to me to be comprised of innumerable component parts of something that could be considered akin to the pieces of the game known as Lego.

On reflection, it seems to me that Mahler took snatches of music he had composed in the past, and wove them into a new fabric, a kaleidoscopic invention based on existing elements and reassembled in a different form. Last night’s performance lasted for almost an hour and a half, and every note, every chord, every passage was unmistakably Mahler. But although the individual parts did not seem quite to cohere into a consistent whole, the eruption of sound at the end drew a roar of appreciation and applause from the audience. And so we went out into the cold, wet night warmed and uplifted by Mahler’s inimitable genius.

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How can you make sure that neither you nor your near and dear ones are subjected to any of the natural and man-made disasters that seem to lurk around every corner? Several of the many pitfalls that await the average man or woman in the modern world are tackled in this book, whose author is apparently a well-known television personality in the USA and host of an investigative program designed to ferret out and tackle such issues.

So this book, which is also plugged as ‘The Essential Guide to Keeping You and Your Famile Safe in the Modern World, is the result, or summary, of his and his team’s efforts to take the sting out of many of the dangers that are now almost an inevitable part of daily life for many of us. Thus, for example, his first chapter focuses on protecting the home, whether from burglars, mold or fire, amongst other things. His principal piece of advice is to be prepared and have a plan for every contingency that might arise. Being a TV personality and having a producer and a team of assistants ready to cooperate in setting up hypothetical situations and consult experts in each field is obviously a help, but it results in invaluable information and advice for those of us who are not so well endowed with outside assistance.

The bottom line varies in each instance. So in the case of a burglary, for example, Rossen’s advice, based on interviews with law-enforcement officials, is to cooperate. “If they ask where your jewelry is, you tell them. You can always get more cash or sapphires, you can never get a new heartbeat.” When it comes to mold, of course, your course of action is to call in an expert, know where to look for hidden caches of the dreaded infestation, and invest in good cleaning materials (and a good cleaner, too, I might add).

Tips on how to behave if your house catches fire or you are caught in an air-crash or a tornado abound. In the case of a fire, his advice (again, based on the advice of experts) is to leave the place immediately without hanging around to save any items, whether essential or not. If there’s a tornado in the offing you won’t have much time to think about what to do, but Rossen is advised by an expert that the best place to be is in a bath-tub. I’m not so sure about this, as when I was living in the Mid-West of the USA my children were told at school to go down to the basement and sit with their backs to a supporting wall. What protection a bath-tub would provide is not made clear in Rossen’s book, and I have the feeling that he got something wrong somewhere along the way. But since he writes about all the various horrible things that can happen to us in a way that is both entertaining and enlightening, it doesn’t seem fair to quibble.

In addition, over the years of preparing his TV programs Rossen has undertaken a great deal of research, exposing himself to dangers of various kinds, and is now prepared to share his experience and knowledge with the wider public. His book is obviously geared toward the American public, and deals with topics that are more likely to affect people there, but many of the subjects he tackles are certainly universal. Like most countries, America has laws designed to protect the consumer from scams of various kinds, and it transpires that all over the world there are unscrupulous people whose sole aim in life is to steal from, cheat, swindle, or otherwise harm innocent members of the general public. Jeff Rossen has made it his mission in life to protect us from those would-be crooks, and I for one am grateful to him for sharing this information with the rest of us.